Gabriel Garcia Marquez by Gerald Martin

In this exhaustive and enlightening biography—nearly two decades in the making—Gerald Martin dexterously traces the life and times of one of the twentieth century’s greatest literary titans, Nobel Prize-winner Gabriel García Márquez.

Martin chronicles the particulars of an extraordinary life, from his upbringing in backwater Columbia and early journalism career, to the publication of One Hundred Years of Solitude at age forty, and the wealth and fame that followed. Based on interviews with more than three hundred of Garcia Marquez’s closest friends, family members, fellow authors, and detractors—as well as the many hours Martin spent with ‘Gabo’ himself—the result is a revelation of both the writer and the man. It is as gripping as any of Gabriel García Márquez’s powerful journalism, as enthralling as any of his acclaimed and beloved fiction.

Gerald Martin is Andrew Mellon Professor of Modern Languages at the University of Pittsburgh and president of the International Institute of Ibero-American Literature. Publications include Journeys Through the Labyrinth (1989), critical editions of Miguel Angel Asturias's Hombres de maíz (1992) and El Señor Presidente (2000), as well as several major contributions to the Cambridge History of Latin America .

NPR

Gabriel Garcia Marquez is the most widely-read Latin American author alive today. The writer, a winner of the Nobel Prize for literature, is a master at spinning tall tales with the details of his own life. That proved to be a challenge for Gerald Martin, who has spent the past 17 years working o...

USA Today

He also explores the roots of magical realism and details what winning the Nobel Prize in literature meant not just for Garcia Mrquez but for Latin Americans.Martin admires Garcia Mrquez the writer but doesn't worship the man who comes across charming but more shrewd than his man-of-the-people pu...

Red Room

His Love In The Time of Cholera (my particular favorite) features a man named Florentino Ariza who has been waiting for fifty-one years, nine months and four days for the love of his life, Fermina Daza, to get rid of her husband so that he, Florentino, can pursue her for himself.